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Keywords:
No Great Exhibition
by Kitty Scott
Date: 17 July 2005
Event: Banff
Kitty Scott
Kitty Scott is curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. Scott has organized such exhibitions as Daniel Richter Pink Flag White Horse (Power Plant 2004), Ken Lum Works with Photography (Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography 2002); Peter Doig (Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, 2001), Universal Pictures 3.1 (Blackwood Art Gallery, 2001), Universal Pictures (Melbourne International Biennial, 1999), Bankside Browser (Tate Modern, 1999), Francis Al˙s: Le temps du sommeil (Contemporary Art Gallery, 1998) and Browser (Roundhouse, 1997). She is currently working on an exhibition featuring a selection of works from the Art Metropole Collection. She has written extensively on contemporary art since 1989 and has published exhibition catalogues and essays on numerous artists, including Francis Al˙s, Roy Arden, Genevičve Cadieux, Janet Cardiff, Peter Doig, Geoffrey Farmer, Brian Jungen and Ron Terada. Kitty Scott is visiting professor at the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, and adjunct professor at York University, Toronto, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and University of Ottawa, Ottawa.
Abstract
This paper originated in my response to an invitation from Terence Dick, the Head of Public Programs and Education at The Power Plant and Barbara Fischer, the Director/Curator at the Blackwood Gallery, the University of Toronto at Mississauga. Terrence and Barbara organized a panel for the Toronto Art Fair based on the question, "What is a great exhibition?" For this presentation at the Unspoken Assumptions: Visual Art Curators in Context Symposium I have annotated the original talk I gave at the Toronto Art Fair. While this response is less a direct answer to the symposium organizers' questions, it is perhaps more a reaction to their statement concerning history and responsibility.
In my estimation Aurora Borealis was a great exhibition. More than that, in 1985 it was a groundbreaking exhibition of contemporary Canadian installation art. Organized by curators René Blouin - now a Canadian dealer - Normand Thériault and Claude Gosselin, the works in the exhibition addressed a broad variety of themes, however the overarching concept was the importance of installation in recent Canadian practice. The exhibition included work by 32 artists, most of whom were from the Montreal and Toronto area and a few others from farther east and west. Aurora Borealis was not an institutional venture, but one organized independently by the Montreal International Centre of Contemporary Art, under the presidency of Claude Gosselin.
During the process of researching Aurora Borealis, I began to think about the history of large-scale exhibitions of Canadian art. The National Gallery of Canada has organized the majority of the exhibitions of this type. From 1926-1933 the Gallery produced Annuals, in 1953 they instituted Biennials because the annuals had grown too large. For the 7th Biennial of Canadian Painting (1968), the National Gallery of Canada invited a foreign curator to make the selections. William Sietz, an American Museum Director and former curator at the Museum of Modern Art, traveled the country for 45 days and visited 188 artists. As Diana Nemiroff has noted, the Gallery had just started collecting international art and wanted to be measured by international standards. More recent contemporary exhibitions are Jessica Bradley's Pluralities (1980), which was followed by Jessica Bradley and Diana Nemiroff's Songs of Experience (1986). Then came the last and final national survey organized by the National Gallery of Canada, the Canadian Biennale (1989) organized by Nemiroff. Although issues of national representation and identity politics have dogged these latter exhibitions, it was hoped that the Biennale would continue through the 90s with different institutions across the country taking responsibility for the event.
None of the major Canadian institutions picked the idea up and the biennial idea died. Whereas in other countries such exhibitions continue to thrive, one need only look at the examples provided by the Whitney Biennial and the Tate Triennial. It could be surmised that Canadian artists, curators, critics and institutions are no longer interested in producing these big national exhibitions as none have occurred. Perhaps there is no longer any need for survey shows of Canadian art. Or perhaps it is about time for a re-evaluation of the situation.